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One of the last books published by the modernist author Sherwood Anderson (now known for his revolutionary, transgressive short story collection “Winesburg, Ohio“) was “Home Town,” a WPA-funded 1940 examination in prose and photos of the waning small American town, with its inevitable strip of unpretentious diners, practical hardware stores and other staple businesses around which community life revolved. Even in the late 1930s, the rise of the automobile was expanding horizons, enabling sprawl and killing the intimacy of smaller communities that Anderson, like many Americans, found simultaneously comforting and stifling.

Decades of highway construction drove development away from urban centers all over the country and around the world, but nowhere has that phenomenon been more pronounced than Los Angeles, a city of more than 3.8 million people with such a remarkable absence of a clearly delineated central downtown — “Downtown” itself having become a ghost town at night and, for that matter, during many hours of the day — that it does not contain a highly symbolic target for post-9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Urban Dictionary calls L.A. “a massive tangle of highways and roads, also rumored to contain people and houses.”

For at least half a century, however, Americans have suffered a case of automotive and suburban remorse in the form of angst-ridden cris de coeur in the vein of Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road” (1961). A notable architectural reaction against sprawl was/is the New Urbanism movement that began in the 1980s, an attempt to recreate the small-town vibe documented by Anderson by increasing population density in new developments centered around pre-fab mini-downtown business districts that seek to be pedestrian-friendly.

“In a process the mayor describes as ‘urban acupuncture,’ the city plans to add bike racks, plazas, crosswalk upgrades and other amenities aimed at drawing in pedestrians and attracting new businesses” to 15 thoroughfares.

Some Angelenos are skeptical. Some worry Great Streets will fail, as have similar initiatives attempted by Garcetti’s predecessors. Others worry it will screw up traffic, a perennial problem in the city. Then there are those who worry it will work:

“In Highland Park, once sleepy York Boulevard has become a magnet for an array of middle- and upper-middle class needs: coffee, comic books, vegan ice cream, and $5 donuts. Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, once favored mainly by locals, is now a regional tourist destination with prices to rival Rodeo Drive. Backers of the Great Streets program hope to achieve similar success.”

Overpriced coffee, pretentious deserts and overpriced pastries spell one thing: gentrification, the process of “improving” a neighborhood by driving up rents and expelling long-time residents, many of whom happen to be poor and/or have brown skin. (I’m OK with stores that sell comics, though.)

Aside from inconveniencing poor people and minorities with evictions and forcing them to commute from more distant suburbs to their jobs, gentrification makes neighborhoods strips ethnic flavor and makes them bland. Surely it should be possible to attract pedestrians to city streets minus gentrification — a mix of commercial rent control, curation of businesses and guarantees to long-term residents that they will be allowed to remain over the long run — but it hardly happens after the developers get involved. Given this history, it’s far more likely that Great Streets will become Great Streets for Upscale White People.

The statewide legalization of marijuana in Colorado, for recreational as well as medicinal use, has prompted serious consideration of the drug’s health effects and socio-political ramifications. Well, that sure took awhile.

In musings that might surprise those who remember his “Moonbeam” period (but not those who have noticed there’s no squarer square than an old hippie), Gov. Jerry Brown took to Sunday morning TV to worry aloud that emulating Colorado could leave the state defenseless against (a) foreign business competition and (b) terrorism.

“How many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?” Brown mused. “The world’s pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together.”

The governor didn’t say whether his garbled grammar was attributable to pot or the shortcomings of his secondary education.

I’m always interested in policy appeals motivated by fear. Politicians have unleashed an awful lot of threats — a few real but mostly imagined — during the last decade and a half. And they haven’t exactly made us a better, stronger or more economically successful nation. Brown’s thoughts are nowhere close to the depraved paranoia of Dick Cheney; the idea that California will be morally and economically weakened, its security undermined, because a tiny minority of the state’s residents regularly indulge in the evil weed seems about as serious and substantial as a puff of smoke.

Stay alert? What’s going to happen if we don’t, governor? Are Chinese sweatshop workers going to take a fiscal victory dance on the bones of our stoner-sapped competitiveness? Will our collected stonedness open up the one big chance radical Islamists have been waiting for?

Californians won’t have the chance to vote for legalized pot until November 2016 — if they’re not too wasted to remember.

After the state of Colorado rolled out legalized marijuana, other states are considering following suit. Now, for the first time, intelligent people are questioning whether pot is truly as universally harmless as advocates often argue.

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Books By Ted Rall:

Publication Date: March 13, 2018
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He thought his church career was drawing to a close. Then he was asked to take over a Catholic Church in crisis.
Religiosity was in decline in the West. And the Catholic Church was in bigger trouble than any other institution you could think of. Losing parishioners, shrinking in power and prestige and discredited by corruption and sex…

Publication Date: December 12, 2017
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Legendary infiltration journalist Harmon Leon is at it again, this time teaming up with ferocious political cartoonist Ted Rall answer the question most of America has been asking: "What the hell happened in 2016?" In their new book, Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America, Leo…

Publication Date: July 26, 2016
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Everyone in America thought they knew Donald Trump: the real estate magnate, reality TV star and bigger than life personality lived his life in the tabloids. Little did they know - though he hinted at it repeatedly - that he planned to take American politics by storm. This graphic biography explores the little-known episodes that helped form…

Publication Date: January 19, 2016
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As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders was surrounded by grinding poverty that turned families against each other as they scrimped and saved to pay their bills.
Bernie saw politics as his chance to give a decent life to everyone, not just those born to wealth or the lucky few who hit it big. But the Democratic Party and the co…

Publication Date: August 25, 2015
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As many as 1.4 million citizens with security clearance saw some or all of the same documents revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Why did he, and no one else, decide to step forward and take on the risks associated with becoming a whistleblower and then a fugitive? Rall's all-comic, full-color biography delves into Snowden's early l…

An independent account—in words and pictures—of America’s longest war from the beginning of the end to the end of the beginning.
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I made two trips, the first in the wake of 9/11, the next ten years later…

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This autobiographical graphic novel is a collaboration between me (my story, my writing) and Bluesman cartoonist Pablo G. Callejo. Travel with me to 1984, the year I lost everything. The place is New York City. In the space of a few months, I got expelled from Columbia University, fired from my job, arrested for drugs that weren't even mine, dumped by the girl I thought was The One, and evicted. I…

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This is the book I wanted to write instead of To Afghanistan and Back — everything you ever wanted to know about Central Asia, without having had to attend grad school — but didn't have time. Five years later, I was able to release my Central Asia brain dump, a book anyone can read cold and come away understanding the importance of the region and why it's so interesting.
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The final volume in the "Attitude" trilogy of alternative cartoonists is dedicated to the first wave of webcartoonists (cartoonists whose work is exclusively distributed online). Includes interviews, cartoons and personal ephemera about some of the most exciting artists to lay pen to paper — or stylus to Wacom. Here you'll find political cartoonists, humorists and dazzling graphic experiments, and…

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My first all-prose book marks the beginning of the end of my belief that the Democratic Party was redeemable. Although I have come to believe that moving beyond the duopoly is necessary, liberals and progressives who have not followed me down the radical path will find much to like here.
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The second installment in the "Attitude" trilogy of interviews, cartoons and photos of America's top alternative cartoonists emphasizes cartoonists who deploy novel approaches to humor and the comics medium. Politics are still important, but take a back seat to social commentary in this collection.
Includes the work of well-known artists like Aaron McGruder, who draws the daily comic strip "Boo…

The result of painstaking research and analysis, "Gas War" is the definitive behind-the scenes story of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP) project. Conceived during the 1990s under Bill Clinton, the idea was for the United States to control the vast, newly-tapped Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves — which by some measures exceed those of Saudi Arabia — by building an oil and gas pipeline from Turk…

"The New Subversive Political Cartoonists" is the first volume in my '"Attitude" trilogy: the definitive record of the political cartooning scene that exploded in alternative weekly newspapers during the 1980s and 1990s. It features interviews of, cartoons by and photos and ephemera about 21 ground-breaking alternative political cartoonists who revolutionized the form. The Iowa City Gazette called…

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A collection of 150 of my political cartoons published between 1995 and 2000. These pieces tackle the disappointments of the Clinton years, popular music, the dot-com boom to screwed-up relationships. I added commentary below most of the cartoons to place them into historical context.
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Ted Rall is the political cartoonist at ANewDomain.net, editor-in-chief of SkewedNews.net, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is the author of the biography "Trump," to be published in July 2016.